John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  Frantisek August (alias ‘Adam’) is often linked with both Frolik and my father. He worked at the London embassy between December 1961 and October 1963, just before Frolik did his term there between 1964 and 1966. Like Frolik, August defected in the summer of 1969 – because they were both worried about their position following political manoeuvrings in Prague. As the letter to Mayhew explained, August was first interviewed by the security service in 1969, and at that time had no knowledge of the recruitment of a British minister, but in the spring of 1975 – when my father was all over the international newspapers and TV – he suddenly remembered that Stonehouse had been recruited in the 1950s, and started saying he’d seen a file in Prague which he believed to be that of Stonehouse. The security service weren’t buying it because August had said none of this in 1969. According to August, he met my father in the late 1950s and had a ‘debriefing’ session with him in Czechoslovakia, but as my father wasn’t recruited until 1960 – according to the StB file – who is to say this wasn’t just a conversation, if it happened at all. August is the source of the notion that my father was also a KGB spy, and that really emanates from August’s main thesis that everyone was a KGB spy. That was his USP, and the CIA loved all that. By the time August published his 1984 memoirs, Red Star Over Prague, he’d abandoned his Stonehouse fantasy and had not one word to say about him.

  ‘The Frolik Affair Meeting’ was held between James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, along with Callaghan’s PPS Ken Stowe, in the prime minister’s room at the House of Commons on the 18th July at 9pm. The prime minister began by referring to Mayhew wanting to put a Question down that day, but Mrs Thatcher immediately intervened and said that she ‘had asked that the Question should be withdrawn because the Prime Minister would not have had time while at Bonn to attend to these matters’.23 Callaghan must have taken a sigh of relief. Now he could get on with some work. Poor Stowe, on the other hand, had to meet Mayhew at 9.30pm to go over the whole thing again in Mrs Thatcher’s office at the House of Commons, at her ‘invitation’.

  Frolik knew nothing about John Stonehouse yet he managed to waste the time of a great many people who had better things to do. MI5 didn’t seem to think much of Frolik, but his allegations were kept alive by the press and various right-wing elements in the British establishment. The man who published his book, Leo Cooper, made the most appropriate observation about him: ‘It was all teasing. Frolik always knew somebody who had seen a dead donkey.’24 The fact that so many people were fooled by him, or pretended to be for their own purposes, says more about them than about Frolik himself.

  * A D‑Notice was a request from the UK government to newspaper editors and broadcasters not to publish or convey information to the public that was deemed a threat to national security. Although advisory, it was invariably complied with. Today, a similar system is in place under the title DSMA-Notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice).

  † The IRD was founded in 1948 by Labour Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who thought that ‘The most effective method of countering Soviet propaganda was to provide specific information refuting the misrepresentations made by the Soviet Government.’ (Ref: Ernest Bevin, Cabinet Meeting (48), 2nd Conclusions, 8th January 1948, The National Archives File CAB 128/12/2, page 16.) It provided scripts for ‘The Voice of Britain’, a radio station based in Cyprus that promoted British policy in Arabic and English, as well as suggesting authors and themes for books that Bodley Head published under their ‘background books’ series, which the IRD underwrote by purchasing 15,000 copies of each which they distributed to Foreign Office posts around the world. The authors were often unaware that a ‘see-safe’ arrangement with a secretive Foreign Office department was behind their success.

  ‡ On the 18th November 1975, the CIA introduced Frolik to the Senate Committee of the Judiciary as ‘one of the most senior Eastern intelligence agents to defect to the West since World War II’. He was there to give evidence at the closed session hearings on ‘Communist Bloc Intelligence Activities in the United States.’ He named John Stonehouse as an agent, saying, ‘Subject is under investigation today for embezzlement, fraud and insurance fraud.’ Frolik regaled committee members with stories including how a Canadian hockey team had been made so exhausted by the sexual exploits of clandestinely recruited Czech prostitutes the night before the 1959 World Hockey Championships finals, they lost the next day to the Czechs. He told them how Czech agent Mrs Zizka had been assassinated in 1962 by an StB and a KGB agent because she and her husband were about to defect, being an alternative version of events known to the New York police – that her husband killed her and then drove from Manhattan at 110 miles an hour, pursued by the police who, when he crashed, shot him in the shoulder, before Mr Zizka shot himself in the head. Frolik said, ‘I cannot prove that this is true,’ but that he’d heard it from ‘numerous people in the Czech service’. Then he scared the committee rigid by telling them that the KGB directed and coordinated the Czech secret services, that more than half the people in the Czech embassy in Washington were spies, as were Czechs at the UN, not to mention that Czech spies were masquerading as American citizens and naturalised immigrants, and they had agents in various Government agencies as well as in organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union. (Ref: ‘Communist Bloc Intelligence Activities in the United States,’ 94th Congress, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 18th November 1975.) Frolik’s performance in front of the paranoid anti-communist Senators no doubt helped ensure the continuance of the CIA’s very generous budget.

  20

  Secrets and the Security Services: MI5, MI6 and the CIA

  ‘There is absolutely no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5, people who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, a lot of them like Peter Wright who were right-wing, malicious, and with serious personal grudges were giving vent to these and spreading damaging malicious stories about some members of that Labour government.’1

  John Hunt, cabinet secretary, 1973–79

  There was nothing my father could have done to avoid being branded a spy. Although he was completely innocent of the charge, circumstances conspired to allow the miasma of suspicion to fall on him. I don’t entirely blame the press for this, because they were fed the idea by people within the secret services – by which I do not mean the ‘official’ MI5 or MI6, but rather certain rogue elements within those organisations, who were themselves encouraged by the paranoia of the CIA.

  During the Cold War it was not possible, as a government minister, to avoid having contact with countries behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Political biographies make it clear that politicians of all parties were taking trips to Eastern Europe or Russia, attending receptions and meeting delegations at their embassies, or bumping into personnel from those embassies on the diplomatic circuit. And some of those personnel were spies. They didn’t advertise it, so a politician wouldn’t have known the difference between a regular commercial attaché and a spy who hid behind that official title.

  If a politician suspected he’d been approached by a spy, it was expected he would report it. When my father was minister of state at the Ministry of Technology, he went to Czechoslovakia to sign a technological agreement and, following an approach, he reported the events to George Wigg, who Harold Wilson had appointed to act as liaison between the Labour government and MI5/MI6. One night, after dinner with other members of the delegation, my father had entered his hotel suite to find Robert Husak and another man sitting, sinisterly, in the dark. Husak had a bottle of wine with him, and introduced the man as a fellow diplomat about to be sent to London. They talked and drank until 1am, then left. My mother remembers my father telling her that he took this as a crude attempt to recruit him, saying it was very clumsily done, with them trying to get him drunk. The next day, when the delegation went skiing, Husak’s friend came up alongside my father on the slopes; nothing much was said. In July 1968, this character turned up at a dinner party in Hampstead
at the London home of the Czech Ambassador, and tried to talk to my father, who avoided him. The guest of honour at this dinner was Dr Ota Sik, the deputy of the leader of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, who tried to introduce liberal reforms and in so doing incurred the wrath of the Russians, who reacted a month later by invading with tanks and bringing in another twenty years of repression.

  My father had first been made suspicious of Husak when he’d approached him at a Czech embassy reception, and pressed him for lunch, which they subsequently had. My father reported what had happened to the security officer at his ministry, David Purnell. The authors of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, say this: ‘MI5 … although tipped off about the meeting by Stonehouse, did nothing to warn him about Husak’s identity and let him continue the meetings, using him as a kind of bait.’2 Apparently, this is what MI5 had done to another Labour Party minister, Charles Loughlin. When my father later reported the events in Czechoslovakia to George Wigg, he expected Wigg to pass that information to the security service. Presumably they knew that Husak was an StB agent, so why didn’t they tell my father and warn him? That omission could make a government minister vulnerable to the pernicious interest of the StB – a situation the secret service are tasked to avoid, surely?

  On 12th March 1970, Tony Benn asked the Ministry of Technology’s security officer, David Purnell, to come and talk to him about the impending trial of the MP Will Owen, who denied passing classified information to the StB but had admitted passing them non-classified information and being paid for it, after being identified by the defector Josef Frolik. Benn didn’t want the date of the trial to clash with the visit of the Czech minister of technology, who was due to visit Benn in London in April. That would be too embarrassing. Purnell told Benn what information was likely to come out in the trial, including that Owen was handled by Husak – as recorded in Benn’s diary: ‘The Czech diplomat in question, who is going to be named, is Robert Husak, and apparently he and John Stonehouse used to talk informally and personally while John was at Mintech. Purnell told me he had a record of all these discussions and it appeared that John’s name might come out at the trial and the press were going to make a big thing of it. Purnell said he would like to go and see John Stonehouse if I had no objection, and I said I had none. I don’t think anything improper will emerge but one can imagine what the press will make of it.’3 After this conversation, Benn thinks that nothing ‘improper will emerge’, which indicates that Purnell, being aware of the ‘record of all these discussions’ thinks there was nothing untoward in them. Indeed, MI5 left my father to get on with his job, which implies they weren’t worried he was passing information to the Czechs – that he was not, in fact, a spy. This appears to be the first time the security services thought it appropriate to let my father know that the man with whom he had been discussing the sale of VC10 planes was an StB agent.

  My father had been appointed a privy counsellor almost two years earlier, in June 1968, and I’d expect the Security Service to have made additional security checks before giving him clearance to act as an advisor to the Queen at Privy Council meetings. But no doubts were raised about him then, otherwise his elevation to this highly trusted position would not have gone ahead. Indeed, it’s significant that none of the StB agents or defectors seem to have known about my father’s role as a privy counsellor, implying once again that their knowledge was superficial and not first-hand.

  My father was a pawn in a much larger game of chess. In Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay say this: ‘By the time that the Frolik allegations had winged their way across the Atlantic in 1969, MI5 had had Stonehouse under surveillance for some years, ever since he reported the first approach from Husak. They knew on the ground that the stories about Stonehouse were fiction, but the Frolik allegation provided them with a weapon to use against Wilson.’4

  Harold Wilson was in the sights of the chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division, James Jesus Angleton, because Wilson had been involved in – although not responsible for – sales of jet fighters to the Soviet Union.* Also, Wilson had taken twelve trips to Russia during the 1950s, either through his position at the Board of Trade or when working for the trading company Montague Meyer. He’d been buying timber so Britain could rebuild all the houses that had been blown up during the war: we needed timber and didn’t have any; Russia had half the wood in the world. Wilson acquired it for the UK and while some would consider that a valuable act in the national interest, the CIA had to make something of it. The CIA and MI5 were also suspicious of Wilson’s friends who traded with the East. Some people in the security services on both sides of the Atlantic also believed the far-fetched notion that the former leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, had been assassinated by the KGB to allow space for Harold Wilson as leader. How this rumour got started is a matter of debate. Although usually attributed to KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, it may have begun with Peter Wright, assistant director of MI5, who told Golitsyn, who told the CIA’s Cleveland Cram, via whom it reached Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5. However it arose, the rumour undermined Wilson in the security communities on both sides of the Atlantic, with Golitsyn its chief advocate and James Angleton its master weaponist. Angleton pounced on Frolik’s idea that my father worked for the StB because, as a Wilson appointee, he could use it against Wilson.

  It was generally agreed, then and now, that Peter Wright, assistant director of MI5, was out of control, paranoid, inconsistent and badly informed.† He wrote about an approach from Angleton in 1964: ‘Angleton came to offer us some very secret information from a source he would not name. This source alleged, according to Angleton, that Wilson was a Soviet agent.’ Interestingly, Wright also says: ‘I knew from bitter experience that Angleton was more than capable of manufacturing evidence when none existed.’5 Even the CIA would come to realise how much time and energy Angleton’s paranoia had wasted the agency, especially looking for ‘moles’ that didn’t exist. Coincidentally, Angleton resigned on the very day my father was arrested in Australia, the 24th December 1974, after The New York Times revealed that the CIA had been involved in counterintelligence operations against anti-Vietnam-war protestors, and other liberal groups.

  Peter Wright had become more renegade than usual after 1972, when he learned that MI5 were not going to honour the fifteen-year Admiralty pension he’d been forced to give up when he joined ‘the service’. He knew he’d have to find a source of income after he retired, so he went to a London hotel to meet a businessman who said he was interested in security: ‘His colleagues were a ramshackle bunch. They were retired people from various branches of intelligence and security organizations whose best years were well behind them. There were others, too, mainly businessmen who seemed thrilled to be in the same room as spies, and did not seem to care how out of date they were.’ The would-be employer said: ‘We represent a group of people who are worried about the future of the country.’ He wanted information: ‘Anything on Wilson would be helpful. There are many people who would pay handsomely for material of that sort.’ Several other groups had formed with the objective of bringing down the Wilson government including GB75, which was started by the founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, and Unison, a group set up by George Kennedy Young, former deputy director of MI6. One of Young’s big ideas was that non-white immigrants should be subjected to compulsory repatriation. After August 1974, Unison was supported by General Sir Walter Walker, ex-commander of NATO Northern Europe, and morphed under him into Civil Assistance, an organisation he claimed had 100,000 members who were willing to break any general strike called by the unions which he considered riddled with communists. Standing behind all this right-wing sedition was Cecil King, the owner of the Daily Mirror who, according to Wright, ‘made it clear that he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction. It was all part of Cecil King’s “coup”, which he was convinced would bring down the Labour Government and replace it with a coalition led by
Lord Mountbatten.’6

  MI5 itself was a hotbed of anti-Wilson sentiment. Wright wrote that in early 1974, ‘I was in my office when two colleagues came in. They were with three or four other officers … “Wilson’s a bloody menace,” said one of the younger officers, “and it’s about time the public knew the truth.” … The plan was simple. In the run-up to the election which, given the level of instability in Parliament, must be due within a matter of months, MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about leading Labour Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic pressmen. … Soundings in the office had already been taken, and up to thirty officers had given their approval to the scheme.’ Wright wrote that, ‘A mad scheme like this was bound to tempt me. I felt an irresistible urge to lash out. The country seemed on the brink of catastrophe. Why not give it a little push?’7 In the end, Wright decided not to help – by photocopying papers in the director general’s safe – because he was near to retirement and worried he’d lose the little pension he did have. But all these renegades were still in MI5 and prepared to cause whatever trouble they could for Wilson, and the 1969 spy allegation gave them ammo: they hoped that by causing a scandal with Stonehouse, they could bring down Wilson.‡ In The Wilson Plot, David Leigh writes about November 1974, when my father was missing: ‘They must have hoped he had defected’8 – because a defection would have proved the spy theories favoured by the MI5 rogue elements working against the Labour Party at the time.